The little dog chases stuffed creatures, tosses them in the air, growls back and forth across the floor. It makes me feel happy to watch. Like water tossing itself over stones in a stream, or the round yellow flames of a small fire, bursting and receding and bursting again. Outside a juggler in Pandora Park stands under the spreading butternut trees and throws balls of light into Friday night. A woman passes quietly carrying a bundle her feet are wrapped with shiny black duct tape. It's too cold for her to stop and watch. My dog is on her bed now, head resting on a paw eyes drooping. I see her body move in cadence with her breath. It's time to take myself from the window now and find my own way to day's end, down the short hall into the arms of cat and quilt.
When I started this substack I wasn’t really sure whether I would publish new poems or old poems. Published poems or unpublished poems. Well, it just makes sense to me that I share my more recent work. I have a Publications page on my website where old poems can be found.
I wrote Cadence last night. I’m writing a poem a day at the moment, inspired by the great poet William Stafford who wrote a poem a day every day for 40 years. I leave you with this, from the back of his book Writing the Australian Crawl:
- a writer isn’t simply a craftsman with something to say and the skill to say it. Rather, a writer brings those attributes into a process that is filled with exciting emergencies and opportunities. In the end, something emerges that is greater than the sum of its parts.